This website requires certain cookies to work and uses other cookies to help you have the best experience. By visiting this website, certain cookies have already been set, which you may delete and block. By closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to the use of cookies. Visit our updated privacy and cookie policy to learn more.

This Website Uses CookiesBy closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to our cookie policy. Learn MoreThis website requires certain cookies to work and uses other cookies to help you have the best experience. By visiting this website, certain cookies have already been set, which you may delete and block. By closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to the use of cookies. Visit our updated privacy and cookie policy to learn more.

Kia Motors Corp. introduced its next-generation Separated Sound Zone (SSZ) technology designed to allow each person in a vehicle to experience an audio stream tailored to their individual needs, including music, hands-free phone calls, and vehicle alerts, while maintaining a headphone-free social space where driver and passengers can converse freely.

SSZ technology creates and controls the acoustic fields of the car, allowing the driver and each passenger to hear isolated sounds. The many speakers installed in the vehicle feature technology that uses scientific principles to reduce or increase audio levels of sound waves. This negates the overlap of sounds being heard in each seat, creating the same effect as current noise cancellation systems, but without the need for headphones.

“Customers in the autonomous navigation era will demand increasingly customizable entertainment options within their vehicles, which includes technological innovations such as the Separated Sound System,” said Kang-duck Ih, research fellow at Kia’s NVH Research Lab. “I hope by providing drivers and passengers with tailored, independent audio spaces, they will experience a more comfortable and entertaining transportation environment.”

People’s musical tastes vary, so some passengers choose to use headphones during a journey to isolate their audio stream, but this also creates an unnecessary social barrier when interacting with other passengers. When traveling in a vehicle equipped with next-generation SSZ technology, Kia says each passenger can connect their smartphone via Bluetooth and listen to their own music without interference from, or interfering with, other passengers’ audio streams.

When the SSZ is employed, hands-free phone calls can also reportedly be isolated to individual passengers, ensuring privacy when having important phone conversations on the move.

In addition, this technology is said to not only eliminate unnecessary sounds for the passenger, but provide them for the driver. Navigation sounds, or various alerts allow the driver to focus on controlling the vehicle while the SSZ system isolates these sounds, maintaining a quiet area for the other passengers. This has a particularly strong application for drivers with a sleeping child in the vehicle, according to the company.

SSZ technology has been in development since 2014, and the completed mass production system is expected to be ready for installation in vehicles within one to two years.

Products

The global automotive industry – worth $3.5 trillion in annual revenues – faces four concurrent disruptive threats: the connected car, the electric vehicle, autonomous driving technology and the concept of transport-as-a-service. Each threat is potentially existential to legacy carmakers who operate in a low growth, low margin sector that rattles with over capacity, and which is seeing its supply lines reset by cumulative advances in enabling technologies typically deployed by Tier-1 automobile sub-system suppliers. This report focuses on autonomous driving technology.

This issue focuses on the end-to-end transformation of dSPACE, external HMI for pedestrian safety, the latest in over-the-air software updates, Urban Air Mobility commercialization efforts, and our special feature on new mobility and the COVID-19 pandemic.